In the banking system, there are many banks. There are in such banks a variety of individual units, systems and apparatus, which process items such as checks, debit and credit items, and other documents, herein referred to sometimes as items or tickets, through the banking system.
Representative examples of art which may be reviewed by those interested in this historical literature include, as example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,587,856 to Lemelson; U.S. Pat. No. 3,674,924 to Fischer et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 3,868,478 to Zeenkov; U.S. Pat. No. 3,903,517 to Hafner (representing in part the Cummins 4400 KeyScan Multimedia Data Entry System, a key/disk system). Later patents and literature which may be of interest include U.S. Pat. No. 4,027,142 to Paup; U.S. Pat. No. 4,028,733 to Ulicki; U.S. Pat. No. 4,056,828 to Furuta; U.S. Pat. No. 4,064,389 to Patterson; U.S. Pat. No. 4,070,694 to Sakamoto; U.S. Pat. No. 4,077,034 to Dell; U.S. Pat. No. 4,081,842 to Harbaugh; U.S. Pat. No. 4,082,945 to Van De Goor; U.S. Pat. No. 4,090,233 to Holt; U.S. Pat. No. 4,091,424 to Widergren; U.S. Pat. No. 4,096,520 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,096,526 to Furata; U.S. Pat. No. 4,126,779 to Jowers; U.S. Pat. No. 4,135,214 to Weber; U.S. Pat. No. 4,139,869 to Holt; U.S. Pat. No. 4,149,192 to Takewchi; U.S. Pat. No. 4,152,697 to Rider et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,163,260 to Hisao et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,167,758 to Rothgordt; U.S. Pat. No. 4,193,097 to Kwrahavashi et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,205,780 to Burns et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,207,599 to Murayama et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,254,438 to Yamazaki et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,404,649 to Nunley; U.S. Pat. No. 4,298,895 to Arai et al; U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,087,788; 4,201,978; 4,410,965; 4,412,252; 4,510,618; 4,523,330; 4,555,617; 4,564,752; 4,613,986; 4,680,803; 4,685,141; (all assigned to NCR); U.S. Pat. No. 4,510,619 to Lebrun et al and U.S. Pat. No. 4,672,186 assigned to BancTec Inc.
The present application employs a general purpose host system and workstations, such as the Unisys B20 series, computer systems and workstations which were marketed by Unisys corporation prior to the presently described inventions. The host systems have incorporated an Item Processing System known as the IPS701. The Item Processing System represents a standard host as part of a data based file system. Also, the ability to read and sort checks into bundles at high rates is known by the Unisys DP1800 series of processor sorters.
The banking systems currently in place allow for high speed reading and sorting of checks. They also allow for high speed data processing of data both before and after reconciliation. Banks have item processing systems, which allow checks to be read and sorted in accordance with the routing codes for various bank destinations. Once sorted, the results of sorting are bundled into bundles and physically transferred t the receiving bank. The receiving bank also generally is supplied with data tapes, which may include magnetic media and physical documents, usually large printouts and processing tapes. The receiving bank is given a charge for the balances which are due to the sending bank. This is a high speed process. Likewise, the bank's accounting is a high speed computer process. If the receiving banks would automatically accept the sending banks information, the whole process would be a very high speed process.
However, the receiving bank does not do so. The bank needs to verify the physical documents for its customers, and to verify that the sending bank correctly represented all transactions for which it claims a credit or debit. This is a bottleneck called reconciliation.
The present description of our inventions and improvements addresses this bottleneck, and in the course of providing a solution to reduce the amount of time and manpower involved in the bottleneck had to overcome many problems, and we have solved them as described in this application.
Reconciliation has to date been primarily a manual operation, assisted somewhat by calculators and other expedients of expert reconcilers, human experts who know what goes wrong in the transfer of documents between banks of the system, and how to reconcile what is represented to have been sent to a bank with what has been received by the bank. This information is necessary for banks to reconcile their transfer accounts on a daily basis and necessary for the banking system in the United States to function.
The problem of reconciliation is the need to balance a group (a "block" or bundle, having batches) of checks and other documents (credit and debit entries, deposit entries, item memos, etc.) of one sending bank at a bank which receives these documents. These units of documents in any given day may represent 100,000, 200,000 or more documents, a massive number, not readily handled efficiently manually, but this is the current method employed for want of a solution to the problems associated with reconciliation. At the originating or sending bank, the checks are sorted into bundles or batches. These documents, together with a summary printout (or data tape) is sent to the receiving bank which needs to verify the correctness of the accounting made by the sending bank. This bank reads and sorts the checks, and does its own reconciliation in a manner similar to the household checking account of a depositor customer, but applicable to a particular received batch or bundles of checks. These terms "batch" and "bundle" are known in this art. Here in the prior art the "expert" is a person, a reconciler. In our program we refer to a bundle as a block and a batch as a batch.
This expert person is not normally a programmer, but an experienced person who knows from experience gained in the process, what can go wrong with the process. This experience is not readily transferred from one person to another. There are very many variables to consider, and man possible solutions.
There are usually a group of several "expert" reconcilers at any bank. Each one will have a different level of experience. The programs used by these persons are conventional programs. These conventional programs will insert the credits in one column, the debits in another column, and if the columns values are identical, they are said to balance. This kind of processing is routinely and very easily handled by conventional data processing, with code written generally in COBOL or PASCAL, two higher level languages.
The problem to be solved, if you will, is how to make the process of reconciliation better, more efficient, and able to be implemented by operators with minimal or less than full expert knowledge. The present application describes an effective solution to this problem formerly handled by manual labor and a calculator.
The inventors described herein, combine and overlap at least three separate and distinct arts, that of "Expert" systems and their programming, represented by the KES expert language system, those of iterative workstations and their numerical programming represented by commercial workstations of the type sold by Unisys Corporation and others which could implement single or multi-tasking operation systems, represented by BTOS or the new multitasking OS systems of Microsoft, which are applicable to the class of PC's represented by Intel's 90186, 80286 and 80366 series of microprocessors, which also could implement MS-DOS, and the conventional prereconciliation processes for balancing checks or like documents in the form of bundles or batches sent from one bank to another, as represented by Unisys Corporation Financial Information Systems.
These arts to our knowledge, have never been combined. We have made various inventions in each field, in addition to the combination of the various inventions to make an expert reconciler for a bank's computer system which will perform on a routine basis, many of the functions heretofore performed manually.
Elements of the system have existed prior to our invention. Our invention employs a 16 bit computer system, and is preferably implemented in connection with various combinations made with standalone computer systems of the kind sold by Unisys Corporation (a Delaware corporation), as their B20 series, which include a processor based upon the processors sold by Intel Corporation (of the U.S.A. and clones of these systems) known as 80186, 80286 and 80386. The Unisys Corporation systems have an operating system known as BTOS which permits various workstations of the series to communicate between themselves, and act as a cluster of workstations, with at least one workstation of the cluster acting as a file server and having a disk. In addition the systems described may as part of the inventions described with a Unisys V Series medium system host module which implements the prior Financial Information system which could tally the credits and debits in a batch and display whether or not the batch actually balanced.
Communication links between workstations and medium system hosts are also known. Changes have been made to these systems in order to implement the expert reconciler.
Certain processes of the system are implemented in known languages, including "C" and "Pascal" and "COBOL", general purpose higher level computer languages provided by a variety of vendors in the computer field, usually implemented with compilers for "C" and "Pascal" for workstations, with the addition of "COBOL" for medium systems. As an example, ASCII standard "C" allows one "C" program to call another program, or even another program or subroutine written in another language, such as PASCAL or FORTRAN, and complied with the language's compiler. While no changes have been made to the languages themselves, the expert reconciler utilizes these general purpose higher level computer languages to create new drive code for the expert reconciler system.
Also known, was a language expert advisor system known as "KES". We have during the process of inventing the disclosure herein used KES. Accordingly, as prior art we recognize the compiler for a language known as "KES", an "expert" language, in its version known one year prior to the filing date of this original application. That "KES" language is marketed by Unisys Corporation and Software A&E (Software Architecture and Engineering) of Arlington, Va., U.S.A. That version of KES (a version known as 2.0) is representative of the "expert systems" in commerce. These are advisor systems designed to act as standalone systems. These "expert systems" use a system of rules, whether the system is rule based or frame based, and information in the form of expertise is sorted. These "expert" systems allow a less experienced person to interact with the information for having that system help solve a problem. In general, the expert systems are very inefficient in doing computations, and they are not integrated to other systems. Some "expert" systems may have permitted access of the user to go to a spreadsheet package, a "Lotus" or something like that, and KES in its earlier version allowed, and indeed required, the user to write a "C" level routine which was to become part of the KES expert advisor program and which "C" program shared the KES library and called and returned values to certain KES library functions. However, in general if an "expert" system needs to do number crunching, many additions and subtractions representative of a balancing transaction and efficiently handles by "conventional" processing, the expert system can not do it or can't do it efficiently. Furthermore, KES and other prior art systems could not be integrated with an interactive "conventional" processing system which shared a large information database. As a result the prior art "expert systems" could not interact with the conventional data processing systems. Instead of operating like the systems which we describe in this application, these prior arts systems are prompted or controlled by the operator. Thus in order to accomplish the tasks, the operator needs to be an expert himself, selecting what operations need to be performed. Furthermore the conventional data processing structures did not permit the operator to perform a balancing task automatically and call upon the programmed expertise to perform expert tasks.